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Mike_D's 2017 Silverado 1500 LT Z71 (WIP)


Mike_D

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1 hour ago, PMad said:

Haha yes!

 

FYI: These are the Go Rhino Dominator D4 dual step nerf bars.

 

I have only 2 issues with these: 1) When screwing in one of the bolts into the main tube, the rivet that holds the bolt came out very easily, so out of 8 bolts on that side, 7 of them are installed, one isnt. 2) The two steps on each side are made to look almost like they are floating, connected at the bar but they stretch back towards the tube but appear to have no supports in the back, but they do... The problem is that while the front steps appear perfectly flat, the back steps appear to have the floating side up higher, so they arent as level as the fronts. You can only tell if you really look, but once you see it, its super obvious! You cant really see it in the pictures though. 

On your  mirror's - heat, power fold , turn signal  ?  where they plug & Play , or did you have to add some pins ?? i looking to switch my DL8 to DL3 ( heat ,  power fold , turn , ect. ) . How hard was the switch over . Thanks

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3 hours ago, slj2008 said:

On your  mirror's - heat, power fold , turn signal  ?  where they plug & Play , or did you have to add some pins ?? i looking to switch my DL8 to DL3 ( heat ,  power fold , turn , ect. ) . How hard was the switch over . Thanks

It wasnt too bad, but i had to take the door panels off to get to the wiring. When you open your door all the way and look where the hinges are, you can see a ribbed tube (haha) going from the door to the frame of the truck. Thats the harness that you have to take out, and add a couple wires in at. It wasnt very hard, but i'm pretty sure i missed something or followed the wrong directions.

 

The options I choose were;

  • Cap Color? Paintable
  • Light Option? Smoked Strip
  • Flood or Spot Light? High Output Spot
  • Rear Facing Lights? Cargo and Reverse
  • Defrost Options? Both upper and lower
  • Hardwire or Plug and play? Modify harness with kit
  • Manual or Power Fold? Power Fold

I also chose to get the new switch from them for $87 or so. They have been nice, but i have 3 issues with them currently.

  1. I painted them myself but never polished them for the shine. I have everything i need to polish, but I just havent done it yet, so this one is on me!
  2. The passenger mirror is warped. They inspect the glass before using them, so customer support things something might be messed up behind it and have asked me to take it apart to check for that. I havent done it yet, havent had time, but i will soon.
  3. The lights which i guess are considered cargo lights do not turn on when i go in reverse. They are supposed to turn on, i paid for that option, but i followed a youtube tutorial from somebody to install mine. They may not have had that option, and i did have a couple extra parts, so... Something is likely not hooked up, havent had time to look into this yet.

Thats it, aside from those they are great! Its concerning to me that when i open or close the doors, you can see them shake like they are super lose and about to fall off, but after looking that up online, it seems that most tow mirrors do that as a way to prevent wear and tare. I hope thats correct! 

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Finally got my seat covers! Here's the before and after, and some others:

 

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oOpB4xJ.jpg

 

They were a royal pain to install, tore up my fingers pretty good with all of the rubbing and pulling and crazy grips i had to put on these things to pull them over the seats and get everything in place. I bled, but i got them on and they look pretty dang good! They look damn near factory actually! Thats always a perk, but I did run into issues.

 

On the front seats, on the inside edges of the back pieces (next to the center console), i couldnt find a way to pull down on that spot properly and get the slack out, so they look like this on the sides closest to the center console:

 

Ibd8RfR.jpg

 

That actually looks quite a bit worse than it looks in person, but i keep rubbing it down and trying to move things around just enough to hopefully even it out a bit.

 

The biggest problem I had was the back seat. When i lift the seat up, my truck does not have the feature that allows me to fold down the seat back to get behind the back seats. I did find a mod a year or so ago (https://youtu.be/1ZgS_Lg8a7Y) that gives me that feature, but you have to completely remove the back seats to do this, and yes, i did this, because it felt IMPOSSIBLE to get the cover over the back seat. The reason is the bottom of the rear seat back cover attaches at the bottom (under the seat) with Velcro. The hook part of the velcro went down the back and stuck to the back of the seat as though it was the hoop side of the velcro, so i couldnt get it to go down at all, i tried for an extremely frustrating and infuriating 30 minutes before taking out the back seat, doing that hack, and putting the covers on while the seats were out of the truck. I do believe that the back seat covers are made a tad bit too small. I made those suckers as tight as i possibly could, and i had it as tight as i could get it and the velcro couldnt attach in some areas, and was barely attached everywhere else. Doing this while the seat was not removed i think would be impossible!

 

The last issue i have is this:

 

m6FQRzH.jpg

 

That's a picture of the back seat, between the 60/40 seats (the two seats) where they separate, one side is 1 seat, the other side is 2 seats. The problem here is there's flaps on both seat bottom covers that get tucked in where they go together, but there's no place to permanently tuck those flaps in. This results in that flap getting caught on the seat belt latches and completely covering them when bringing the seat back down after lifting it. Not a huge issue, but if i forget, then my kids wont be able to buckle up without me getting back out and fixing it again. In the picture on the right, i reached down there and pulled it up. The first time they covered it, i didnt realize it did that because of how perfectly it covered the seat belt cover. It only covered one so i still saw the second one. It took me a few seconds to figure it out and fix it.

 

Aside from that, i love them! Total pain in the ass to install, but as far as i can tell at this point, I like it a lot! The directions suck and i have an extra piece. The entirety of everything is covered so i'm not sure what this extra piece is for.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/12/2020 at 11:59 PM, Mike_D said:

So i added the 20% tint to the headlights and taillights. This totally killed the look of the chrome tips on the grill so im definitely taking those off.

 

56Ym0vX.jpg

 

I completely botched the vinyl tint on the tail lights. Its just, something i guess i cant do at all on tail lights haha. So i purchased new tail lights. I'm waiting for those to come in.

 

I did get three lights that i'm going to stick in my grill for that special ops look. Here's what those look like:

 

YFIgF9Z.jpg

 

I'm working on a way to mount them, then i'll post pictures of the lights when they are installed, with the chrome tips on the grills removed.

Did you just tint the outside of the headlights, turn signals, and fog lights? I love the look of that and with my black 2017 Z71 I think it would look awesome. How much did it dim the lighting at night?

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  • 2 months later...
On 11/23/2020 at 3:05 PM, Herte1lr said:

Did you just tint the outside of the headlights, turn signals, and fog lights? I love the look of that and with my black 2017 Z71 I think it would look awesome. How much did it dim the lighting at night?

Hey sorry for taking so incredibly long to respond! I never got my notification email that you said anything.

 

What you said is correct, i purchased some vinyl tint that was precut to the size of my headlights, turn signals, and fog lights. I did also purchase them for my tail lights too but those lights have an indentation that totally killed my attempt to wrap them properly, so i just purchased new taillights that were already tinted.

 

Since the tint was 20%, its only letting 20% of the light through. Each headlight is 2000 lumens so it was only letting through 400 lumens, so it was very dim. I decided to upgrade the bulbs to the Lasfit brand bulbs.

 

Check this post here: 

 

 

Essentially, the stock bulbs are 2000 lumens, but i'm not sure if thats total or each. The Lasfit LED bulbs are 5000 lumens each, so with the 20% tint, the lasfit bulbs are shining through at 1000 lumens, which is either half the stock brightness of each bulb, or equal to the stock brightness. Either way, when driving with them i couldnt really tell the difference between stock bulbs with no tint, and lasfit bulbs with tint, however, i had already been driving with my added grill lights that are adding an additional 2700 lumens and lights the road up very nicely, so stock with no tint and lasfit with tint both seem very dim in comparison. There's been several times i've forgotten to turn on my additional lights and have driven around with the lasfit lights (with tint) and never thought it was too dim.

 

I was going to remove the tint if i couldnt find better bulbs. Since i found better bulbs and have the added lights, im happy with the tint and the light output, so it stays!  Let me know if you have any other questions, i'll do my best to answer!

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  • 3 months later...

Updated the stereo. Ended up getting the Phoenix Automotive 12.1" T style screen. It does have some issues and runs a bit slow, but i fully expected that. Below is a picture of my son tampering with the settings. I chose Phoenix because they had Android 9, its a little bit more future proof then Android 8, and the chip (from what i hear) is faster. So that faster chip helps take an already slow system and makes it faster. Its still fairly slow, but works well enough. I contacted some of the other manufacturer's and they pretty much all told me to try the other guys, they weren't all that nice either. Phoenix has been quite good with their customer service (so far).

 

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My first issue was distortion in the louder notes of music, i went to the settings and adjusted the gain for all inputs from 30 down to 28, that fixed it.

 

Then i noticed the left channel was playing out of the right channel, and right played out of the left, so working with them they told me which wires to swap on which cable. I did that swap (nice and easy) and the channels are now correct.

 

I had an issue where sometimes the screen would turn off when starting the truck and i wouldnt be able to turn it back on. They gave me a new firmware which semi-sorta fixed that, but its still happening. They gave me another firmware update after fixing all of my other issues (a couple weeks later) which i'm assuming is the same one they gave me last time, but we'll see, i havent installed it yet. I did find that before starting the truck, if the screen is on i can hit the button in the very top left corner and that'll turn off the screen, then when i start it, it turns back on and works perfectly.

 

I'm ok with little glitches like that if it means i get to have android! Its super nice having it. I'm using Tasker to automatically turn on my hotspot once bluetooth connects to the stereo, then the stereo automatically connects to that hotspot and i can do maps, music, and anything else i want.

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